Category: School Updates

We have been starting some exciting new topics this year.

For our topic work we have been looking at some Scottish comics and their characters. We hope to develop this. Watch this space! This will also contribute to our language work this term. We are also continuing our work on climate change.

In maths we have started looking at fractions, decimals and percentages. We have also been doing data handling and relating this to the warming of Australia and the deadly fires they have experienced.

Following the success of Limited Edition Christmas Forkies in the last few weeks of term “Crafty” business decided to send a donation of £52 to Childline (this allowed for a dolls’ house to be purchased and 1 hour of counselling over the Christmas period).

Looking forward to the new term, P6/7 have decided to focus efforts on our upcoming Spring Fayre and the types of craft packs and Spring items that we might sell. Miss Taylor attended the Parent Council meeting on Tuesday evening, to represent the business, and to offer that P6/7 will be keen to sell goods, and to help support by being the sales teams on stalls from 12.30 – 1.30 on the day of the event (Friday 3rd April).

We have since discussed the budget we have available, and started to look at materials  and resources we may need.

We also spent time looking at our individual skills on My World of Work website. This has a section particularly for Primary Children where pupils can create their own profile and check their skills by completing a questionnaire. This then categorises everyone as a type of animal, suggests jobs that may be suitable for the future and also ways to develop skills now. This proved very popular with everyone and also cause some amusement as we had a number of bears , panthers, koalas and even a clownfish! Despite the humour, the questions asked, give a good insight to personalities and I believe a few parents have already had a go on Thursday evening”! Children can access this website from home now that they have been registered.

We have had another extremely busy learning week in Primary One. We have been reading books about Winter and why some animals migrate and others hibernate. The children were amazed to find out how far geese fly and how many months hedgehogs hibernate. We began thinking about the changes we make during Winter and have created a display showing a bare tree covered with hats, gloves and snowflakes.

We have also listed the skilled we used to create our display – cutting, gluing, painting, drawing, scrunching, using primary colours to make a wash and creating a collage to demonstrate different textures.

We have continued to follow Hamish McHaggis on his adventures around Scotland. Hamish went to visit the Loch Ness Monster but unfortunately she was on her holidays. The story caused great excitement and discussion, so next week we will look at evidence from some non-fiction books and try to decided if there is enough evidence to prove that she exists. We also enjoyed learning about Edinburgh Castle and looking at pictures of the Forth Bridges (Hamish and his friends broke down there on their way to the Edinburgh Tattoo). The children used black fine line writer pens to draw an outline of these famous landmarks.

Pupil Voice

It is very important to us that children within our school have an opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas on matters which affect them. We had a discussion about the learning environment and what the children would like to change within our own classroom. The main message was that they wanted to have their own chair so with that in mind, all children created a name label and now have their own space in the classroom.

Health and Wellbeing – Dreams and Goals

We have been discussing what success and achievement means to us. The children chose one thing that made them feel proud of themselves. A few examples below.

Developing the Young Workforce

Following on from last weeks post,we have had a number of children leading the learning. Below is a picture of Oliver leading a math’s activity during smart start.

Collaboration is another essential skill needed to develop the young workforce. We reminded ourselves of the skills we should use at all times- listening, looking at the person who is talking, allowing others to talk, offering an opinion at the appropriate time. We are practicing effective collaboration every day.

Numeracy

This week I have set up number challenge using Numicon. Numicon is a practical way of representing number and the children have enjoyed exploring it and using it in different ways. We have also been using rekenreks which helps to develop number sense. We have been working on double numbers, rekenreks are a really useful tool for teaching this skill.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.

We have had another busy week in P3/4 this week.

We started our mini topic this week. Our ‘wee tour’ of Scotland. We worked collaboratively with P3 as we explored the names of the different cities in Scotland. P3/4 helped the P3 pupils use an Atlas to discover and correctly place our Scottish cities on a blank map of Scotland. The children also shared some interesting facts that they already know about this amazing country. We completed mind maps to show our prior knowledge of this topic and also came up with some things that we would like to discover.

Keeping with our Scottish themed topic we looked at how to make Scottish Shortbread in our literacy lesson this week. The children were given the instructions, however, these were all jumbled up and the children had to write these in the correct order. But before that we discussed the language that is used in instruction writing. The children were also set the task to include sentence openers that flowed in a sequence of events. Such as: First, next, then and finally. The children really enjoyed this lesson and to expand on this they will use the instructions that they have ordered correctly to make shortbread next week. Look out for a special delivery next week!

Also in literacy the children were introduced to a number of new spelling strategies this week that will help with their spelling words for this week. One of the strategies had the children exploring alphabetical order and showed them that its not always the first letter that we go by. Ask your child to show you some of these spelling strategies.

The children were continuing to work on addition this week. We were using the chimney sum strategy as this has proved tricky for some of the children in the class, especially carrying over those cheeky 1’s! If the children could practice these at home that would be brilliant as we are moving on to subtraction strategies next week.

Thank you for all your continued support and encouragement. Have a lovely weekend.

It has been another busy week in Deans Den as we continue to work on achieving our individual targets. Mrs Morrison is proud of the efforts of all the boys and girls, well done!!

Another success of Deans Den this week has been the children’s enthusiasm towards developing the role of the lead learner within the group. Children are given the opportunity to take a main role in learning opportunities such as storyteller, line leaders and group helper. These are all important skills to develop to help the children become independent learners. Keep working hard boys and girls!!

Happy New year!

It was lovely to see all the children back happy, healthy and ready for the new term.

To start the week off the children and I shared how we all spent our Christmas holidays. We sat around in a circle and took turns talking. This was a great way to practice one of our 4 skills from our skills 4.0 document. This document focuses on what makes a good work force and this term we are focusing mainly on social intelligence. It was nice to hear that they all had a nice time off and that Santa was good to them.

On Wednesday we explored what New Year’s resolutions were and discussed why people set these for themselves. The children then had a look back at 2019 and shared what they enjoyed the most about last year. Focusing on the feelings skill from skills 4.0 the children then came up with their own New year’s resolutions. The children thought about aspects of their learning  and what it was that they would like to improve going forward. There were some great goals set during this task!

This week we have also worked hard to finish our Viking helmets, it was a lovely task to finish our Viking topic. They have all done a fantastic job with these. 

We also closed our Viking topic with an exciting drama lesson. The children loved this lesson and all are budding performers. The children were asked to act out a scenario in which they played estate agents and had to sell a long house to potential buyers. The children were displaying great communication, collaborative and leadership skills throughout this lesson. They worked well together in their small groups to produce some great pieces of improvisation.

Well Done P3/4!

I hope you all have a lovely Weekend!